Page 57 of What Happened to Lucy Vale
Still, we were interested to find out that Lucy Vale was on birth control. Lucy Vale wasn’t necessarily a prude, we felt. But she wasn’t like the other Strut Girls. She wasn’t a partier. She wasn’tlike that. She claimed she wasn’t even interested in having a boyfriend, and we privately doubted she ever had. She wasn’t necessarily naive. But we all felt she was somehow an innocent: a girl so pure, she didn’t even know to be afraid of ghosts.
If she noticed the pair of underwear missing from her drawer, she never said anything to us.
Part 5
One
Rachel
On Thanksgiving, Lucy spoke with Alan for the first time in a year and a half. Well, maybespokewas too strong a word. She was passing Rachel with a blow-dryer, headed for the bathroom, while Rachel was on the phone.
“Is that Alan?” Lucy asked. “Tell him I said happy Thanksgiving.”
“Did you hear that?” Rachel asked him after Lucy had slipped into the bathroom.
For a second Alan seemed too overcome to speak. “Yeah,” he said, half choking the word. “Yeah, I heard.”
“It’s a start,” Rachel said, and he drew a quick breath, as if the idea had knocked the wind out of him.
It was a good day.
At lunchtime they piled in the car and made the drive to Rachel’s aunt and uncle’s house in Willard County. Rachel’s cousin Kelly—the so-called “trad wife,” according to Lucy—had made the drive from Columbus with her husband and three children. Rachel’s grandfather, who had moved into an assisted living facility in Kentucky after his last stroke, was positioned in the living room like some kind of beneficent houseplant, smiling at everyone, occasionally slurring a remark that only his nurse could interpret. Kelly’s children darted through thefamiliar rooms waving imaginary weapons at one another until Lucy wrangled them all to the floor to try a puzzle together.
“If you ever need a babysitter ...,” Rachel said to her cousin, indicating Lucy and the children soberly sorting through the pieces.
“Yes, please,” Kelly said. She dropped a hand on her belly; she was pregnant with her fourth. “Does she give discounts for volume?”
After Thanksgiving dinner—served buffet-style for the chaotic assortment of friends and neighbors who’d also been invited—Rachel lay with Kelly on Kelly’s old bed like they were teenagers again, sneaking away from the crowd to listen to music or gossip about boys. The room still had trace evidence of its former life: a gigantic stuffed turtle; Kelly’s old vanity, once cluttered with makeup and perfume and photographs of her friends; a corkboard where she’d pinned all her concert tickets. Rachel was happy and sleepy and full. Half a glass of wine, undrunk, sat warming on the nightstand. One summer she and her cousin had kept a bottle of SoCo in the bottom drawer of that nightstand, concealed behind a jumble of bras and tampons under the theory that Kelly’s dad would never fish through it. Now they were old. At least, Rachel felt old.
She inched down until her ear was level with her cousin’s warm belly, listening for the sound of the life stirring there, thinking of seeds sleeping underground for winter.
“So how has it been?” Kelly asked. Rachel realized, with a start, that she had been on the verge of falling asleep. “Does Indiana feel like home yet?”
“I think so,” Rachel said. “I love the house.”
Kelly moved her hand up and down the swell of her stomach. “Lucy seems like she’s doing well,” she said. “You must be so relieved.”
Rachel tutted her. “Don’t jinx it,” she said, only half joking.
Kelly turned on her side with a grunt. “What about your special project?” she asked, keeping her eyes fixed on Rachel. Rachel had always loved Kelly’s face: long and aquiline, almost noble, like some old Flemish portrait from the 1600s.
“Little Girl Lost?” Rachel said. She didn’t remember when the nickname for Nina Faraday had dawned on them. More than a decade ago probably—back when Nina Faraday, the girl they’d briefly encountered at a party the autumn before she vanished, was only an incidental topic of interest, a shared point of connection. It was only in the past few years that the moniker “Little Girl Lost” began to haunt Rachel in the way that writing sometimes did, peeking around corners of her attention, shadowing her thoughts as she drifted off to sleep. It would make, she thought, a good title for a book. “Slowly,” she admitted. “There’s so much bullshit to sort through. And I’m getting stonewalled by the sheriff’s department.” She shrugged. “I’m supposed to wait for the changing of the guard.”
“But you’re still going through with it?” Kelly asked. “You still think there’s a story there?”
“There’s definitely a story. There are plenty. That’s part of the problem.” Then: “Why?”
“Nothing. I just thought you might change your mind after you and Lucy got settled, that’s all.”
It wasn’t lost on Rachel, or on her therapist, that her growing interest in Nina’s case had coincided with the worst year of Lucy’s life—the worst year for both of them—when it seemed that Lucy might simply slip away from her, lost to her agonies and her obsessive rituals, lost to the punishment of her peers.
But Lucy was better now. And Rachel still wanted to know what had happened to Nina Faraday.
Rachel poked her cousin in the navel. “You think it’s a bad idea.”
“I didn’t say that,” Kelly said. But she was making a face. “You’ve had a hard few years,” she said after a beat. “Maybe you can just relax for a bit. Let go. Nina’s been missing sixteen years. Another few years won’t hurt.”
“Tell that to my agent,” Rachel said, and they laughed. Rachel propped herself up on one elbow. She realized she wanted Kelly to understand. To bless her, in a way. “Look, I just want to know forsure whether Tommy Swift was involved. I want to know if Jay Steeler helped cover up for him. I mean, for fuck’s sake, the school’s trying to turn the guy into Gandhi. They’re dedicating a whole building to him. It’s not right. Not if he had information about Nina. I just want the truth.”
